Installation view, A Traveling Thread, Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, 2025 © musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Photos: Léo Delafontaine.
Le fil voyageur retraces 60 years of friendship and creative dialogue between Sheila Hicks and Monique Lévi-Strauss, historian of textile arts. The exhibition presents a selection of Hicks’s works—ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental—placed in dialogue with pieces from the museum’s collection selected by the artist that originate from Latin America. These interactions reveal a story of textiles across borders, civilizations, eras, and belief systems.
Through her studies and travels since the late 1950s, Sheila Hicks has developed a body of textile work that challenges traditional artistic categories and hierarchies. At once an inheritor of modernist thinking and ancient techniques, she reinterprets fundamental gestures such as knotting, weaving, braiding, wrapping, and interlacing. In this exhibition, Hicks's works take on new depth through encounters with the rich Andean textile vocabulary of pompoms, ikats, tapestries, and looms from the museum’s collections. Le fil voyageur highlights these works alongside a selection of drawings, maps, and slideshows, as well as photographic archives and audiovisual materials—brought together for the first time in a single presentation.
Through her studies and travels since the late 1950s, Sheila Hicks has developed a body of textile work that challenges traditional artistic categories and hierarchies. At once an inheritor of modernist thinking and ancient techniques, she reinterprets fundamental gestures such as knotting, weaving, braiding, wrapping, and interlacing. In this exhibition, Hicks's works take on new depth through encounters with the rich Andean textile vocabulary of pompoms, ikats, tapestries, and looms from the museum’s collections. Le fil voyageur highlights these works alongside a selection of drawings, maps, and slideshows, as well as photographic archives and audiovisual materials—brought together for the first time in a single presentation.
